About OSGeo Community Projects

Are in the process of working on project governance, documentation, and marketing.

OSGeo Community Projects may not yet have an active developer and user community. They may be benevolent dictatorships or feature experimental and unstable technology.

How OSGeo Community Projects Are Related To OSGeo Incubation

There are two ways for an open source software project to join OSGeo. The first way is through the regular incubation process. This is best for projects that already have an established community of developers and users. (This community should be diverse. This means that developers should come from more than one organization or group.)

If a project doesn't yet have an active and diverse community, it can join OSGeo as an OSGeo Community Project. OSGeo Community Projects get help from the incubation committee with things like choosing an open source license, setting up project governance, promoting the project, and building the project community).

The same volunteers that help software projects through the OSGeo Incubation Process also help OSGeo Community Projects.

Purpose

The purpose of OSGeo Community Projects is to provide a home at OSGeo for projects that don't qualify for our normal incubation process. This allows them to get help from the volunteers on the OSGeo Incubation Committee and to become familiar with the guidelines and operation of OSGeo as an organization. Most OSGeo Community Projects are working to qualify for the normal incubation process, but this isn't a requirement.

The normal OSGeo incubation process requires that software projects meet a high standard for things like project governance. Working through the normal incubation process can involve a lot of work. in contrast, we want the process to become and OSGeo Community Project to be as painless as possible. That allows projects to build community strength before they enter incubation.

Your software project needs to meet the following criteria to be a OSGeo Community Project:

The technology in your software project should be geospatial (or directly support geospatial applications).

Your project should be open source and welcomes new contributions. If you don't have a license selected, we can help with that.

Comparison with Incubation and OSGeo website

As shown below there is some overlap requirements for an OSGeo projects (as defined by the incubation process graduation checklist).

Responsibility

Website Listing

OSGeo Community

OSGeo Project

Geospatial

X

X

X

Open Source

- check headers
- See LICENSE.md

X

X

X

Participatory

- See CONTRIBUTING.md

X

X

X

Open Community

- communication channel
- decision making process

X

Active Healthy Community

- user and developer collaboration
- long term viability

X

Development Process

- version control
- issue tracker
- leadership open to new members
- transparent decision making

X

Documentation

- user documentation
- developer documentation

X

Release Procedure

- release process
- documented testing process

X

Foundation Resources

Website Listing

Technology

Project

Representation

incubation chair

project officer

infrastructure and facilities

X

X

promotion & marketing

X

X

budget

incubation committee

project budget

fundraising

X

X

Community projects do not have a direct budget from the OSGeo board, budget is available via incubation committee outreach and innovation mandate. The incubation process establishes a project as a full fledged OSGeo committee, with a project project officer, with direct access to OSGeo treasurer, and reporting to the board during annual general meeting.

Available branding:

Community

Project

Getting Started

Once your software project has been accepted as an OSGeo Community Project, the Incubation Committee will assign you personal mentor. This mentor will help your project withcommunity building and other tasks. First steps for an OSGeo Community Project include:

Creation a home page for the project. The OSGeo wiki is recommended for this page.

Selection of an open source license (if the project hasn't already done this).

Announcement and discussion of the project on the OSGeo Discuss OSGeo Discussion mailing list.

Establishment of programs and policies for project documentation, copyright assignment, and licensing.

Establishment of programs and policies for software development. This includes version tracking, bug tracking, and feature request tracking, creation of a development road map, and organization of code sprints/events.

Establishment of project governance programs and policies.

Collaboration on technical standards, data formats, and code sharing with other open source geospatial software projects.

Utilization of software development infrastructure like mailing lists, bug trackers, version control software/hosting, and web hosting.

OSGeo Community Projects Checklist

This will be coming soon!

OSGeo Community Project Stages

OSGeo Comminity Projects are assigned a "stage" that helps interested developers and users understand their maturity. Here are the different stages, in a profession from least mature to most mature:

Research Project: This project is in the conceptual stage. There may be some source code written, but it is incomplete or very experiemental. The project may lack deliverables, community support, project infrastructure, project governance, community activity, or marketing and outreach.

New Project: This project is moving beyond the conceptual stage with some concrete code. However the code is still experimental and isn't stable. Projects at this status level could still experience a lot of change in their code base. This project should start to have some project infrastructure and some basic documentation.

Stable Project: This project has functional source code, although it may not be "mature and feature rich". For example, the code may only be usable as a programming library or a command line tool instead of featuring a GUI. The project has started to support users and programmers with communication tools, trackers, and documentation. The project has started to think about project governance and marketing, perhaps creating plans in these areas that are not fully implemented.

Established Project: This project has a usable and user friendly deliverable, like an executable program or a stable and well-deocumented programming library. The project is supporting users and programmers with communication tools, trackers, and documentation. It has started the initial phases of incubation. This includes addressing issues of copyright, licensing, and project governance. The project also has a marketing and community growth plan and has started to implement the plan.